100g raisins or sultanas or dried apricots…
75ml rum, calvados, marsala…
150ml olive oil or walnut oil
200g caster sugar
2 large eggs
350g plain flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1.5 tsp bicarb
1/2 cream of tartar
1/2 tsp salt
450g cubed fresh apple or pear…
zest 1 lemon
100g walnuts or pecans…

Heat the dried fruit and alcohol in a pan until it begins to boil, then leave to infuse while you get on with the rest of the cake. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and butter and flour a 20cm round cake tin.

Beat oil and sugar together, and add the eggs one at a time. The dry ingredients go in next, followed by the fresh and drained dry fruits, lemon zest and nuts. Spoon the batter into the tin and cooki for at least 1 hour – I find it normal takes at least 15 minutes longer. Leave to cool in the tin on a wire rack.

2 seabass, whole, cleaned and scaled
500g waxy potatoes
10 anchovy fillets
1 lemon
250ml vegetable stock

Cut the potatoes lengthways into 3 or 4 slices, they should be 1cm or just less thick. Heat some olive oil in a roasting tray large enough to contain the fish and brown the potatoes on each side. Lay the anchovy fillets on top with the lemon in thickish wedges, place the seabass on top and pour over the stock. Bake for 1/2 hour. Fillet the fish and serve on warm plates with the potatoes, a jug of the liquid left in the pan for a sauce and a green vegetable – we had peas.

Mum and I share a mutual loathing of the wet doughy pap that supermarkets dole up as Aitch Cee Bunz year after year. (Please don’t get even get us started on choc-orange and similar varieties – you are likely to encounter a level of vitriol which is normally reserved for shouting at Radio 4). Until now, she hasn’t had much success with getting the blighters to rise despite trying several types of yeast. This Easter though they came out superbly – judgement finally triumphing over luck. It’s important to not be impatient with proving times – a good couple of hours in all in a cosy airing cupboard but YMMV. No butter needed.

450g strong white bread flour
50g sugar
75g currants
50g chopped mixed peel
1 level tsp salt
7g packet fast action easy blend yeast
1 tsp mixed spice
1 beaten egg
200ml tepid milk
50g melted butter

Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl and add the other dry ingredients. Melt the butter and stir the milk into it, heating until the chill has been taken off. Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in the egg and gradually incorporate the milk and butter to make a dough. Knead for 10 minutes (or a bit less with electrical help). Put the dough in a clingfilmed bowl and find somewhere warm for it to rise for 90 minutes – it should double in size. Knock back and divide into 12 round bun shapes. Arrange these well spaced on a greased baking tray, and cover with a lightly oiled plastic bag and leave to prove for another 20-25 minutes. Preheat the oven to 220 degrees C, and when the buns are all puffy once more, bake for 15 minutes. Heat the 2 tbsps of sugar and water together gently. Once the buns are out of the oven and cooling on a rack, brush all over with the glaze.

I’m just back from two weeks in Tuscany, slap bang in the middle of Chiantishire. Before you hit command-W and wish me the pox in a fit of schadenfreude, it rained every single day. In fact, it’s rained pretty much every day there for five weeks, proving utterly true those proverbs that seem to exist in every language about how rain on just one unassuming day in May can completely bugger up your tan.

So what’s a girl and her mum to do? Well, close the kitchen door, put the telly on with the particularly italian programming blend of boobs and gastronomy – and cook!

This recipe is adapted from a wonderful book called “Ricette di Osterie d’Italia – I Dolci” published by the Slow Food guys. It’s a real insight into the way Italians cook their desserts – very simple ingredients mostly based on nuts, lemons and dried fruits, combined in perfectly honed ways to create subtle but delicious flavours, never overly sweet.

The crostata that follows (a really rich pastry topped with an easy creme patisserie and fresh peaches) was a doddle but was so impressive that we kept eating just to make sure we’d tasted it right.

For the pastry:
300g 00 flour
1 egg and 2 yolks
150g caster sugar
100g butter, very soft
zest of 1 lemon
pinch of salt
1/2 a sachet of italian lievito per dolci, which is probably equivalent to a heaped teaspoon of baking powder

Sift the flour into a large bowl and mix in the sugar, baking powder and the salt. Into the middle put all the other ingredients at once, and mix with a wooden spoon and then your hands to get a rich dough. Cover with clingfilm and leave to rest in the fridge for half an hour. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

For the crema pasticciera:
3 tablespoons flour
5 egg yolks
50g sugar
250ml milk

While the pastry is resting, make the crema pasticciera by heating the milk until nearly boiling. In another saucepan off the heat beat the yolks with the sugar until dissolved, then add the flour, and finally the hot milk, stirring continuously. Put this saucepan over a low flame (or use a bain marie) to bring it to boiling point, and cook for 3 minutes until well thickened.

For the peaches:
500g peaches, blanched in boiling water to peel them, and sliced into quarters or eighths, depending on size

Prepare a tart tin with fluted sides by buttering and flouring it, and lining the base with baking parchment. Roll out the pastry on a very well floured surface – this amount of pastry gives more than enough to line a 28cm tin, but if you have a different size, you can use the extra to lay crisscross strips on top, or make jam crostate with the left over bits. The pastry is really rich, and so fairly impossible to get cleanly into the tin. Mine was a complete patchwork, but came out absolutely fine, just remember that it will expand a fair bit due to the baking powder, so you don’t need to leave it very thick.

When your tin is lined, cover it evenly with the crema pasticciera. If your peaches are very juicy you might want to take steps to make sure the base doesn’t get too soggy – I sprinkled a handful of crushed amaretti biscuits over this cream layer which worked great. Then arrange the quartered peaches in concentric rings over the top. Bake at 180°C for 30 minutes – you may need to protect the pastry edges from getting too brown at some point, just use some aluminium foil.

When my sister-in-law cooks a roast lunch, this is how she makes them:

Finely chop an onion and stick of celery, and sauté slowly in a glug of olive oil until soft. Now add some diced pancetta (since they’re frozen peas, I’m sure you’re allowed to use those handy packets of lardons) and fry that too until cooked. Then add in your peas straight from the freezer with a very small amount of water, just so they have a little steam to breathe in. You can cook these as gently or fiercely as the timing for the rest of the roast dictates (and you can reheat in the microwave), so it’s a zero-stress vegetable.

Second, an idea picked up today from one of my favourite restaurants, Trattoria dei Cacciatori, just outside Milan. We ate a plate of culatello served with a pear poached it in water with white wine and just a little aniseed (no sugar, it wasn’t sweet). It would be delicious with prosciutto or speck too.

No, really! This easy combination of carrots, beetroot and herbs is the only way I’ve ever managed to get them down. I used pre-cooked beetroot from the supermarket, which I’m fairly sure falls on the “sensible shortcut” spectrum of prepared food use (as opposed to the “New Delia” lunatic side. Seriously, tinned minced lamb!?).

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Peel your carrots, top and tail them and then boil, whole, in some salted water until just tender, about 10 minutes. I used a mix of sizes and shapes so it doesn’t have to be precise, but the smaller the tastier. Remove the carrots from the water and put in a mixing bowl with the cooked beetroot. Cut the carrots into rough thirds, and the beetroot into quarters. Pour in a glug each of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and orange juice, a couple of squashed cloves of garlic, some herbs (rosemary and sage worked for me) and season. Give it a good mix around, and then tip out into a roasting dish and put in the oven for half an hour. Great with pork chops.

I’ve got a really atrocious reputation for making scones. The one time I presented my husband with a batch his description was something like “plutonium-filled depth charges”. So, not great then.

But today, I tried a new recipe and they came out brilliantly – my better half could only come up with “crumbly” as a criticism (I can live with that!), and he had to go back for seconds just to be sure. They were light, delicious and golden, and the secret, according to Nigella, is the Cream of Tartar. I’ve no idea what’s in this mysterious substance, but as soon as the scones go into a really hot oven they immediately start billowing up. The best thing about scones? Only 10 minutes in the oven and by the time you’ve split them open and covered them in jam they’re ready to eat.

Heat the oven to 220°C, and don’t be tempted to put the scones in until it’s hit that mark. Sift 250g flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 good heaped teaspoon bicarbonate of soda and 2 heaped teaspoons of cream of tartar. Dice 75g of cold butter and rub in with your fingertips until it’s all combined and looks like crumbs. At this point, you can get fancy and add a small handful of dried fruit or some grated cheese. Then tip 150ml of milk into the bowl, mix just enough to bring everything stickily together and tip out onto a floured surface. I don’t want to say “knead” the mixture but just use your hands to make the dough into a coherent whole – I needed to sprinkle just a little flour in order to remove a bit of moisture. Then flatten it to about an inch, inch-and-a-half high and make six scone shapes. You can use a cutter, but I didn’t have one handy and just used a knife to cut rough wedges. Place the scones on a greased baking sheet, and brush the tops with a little beated egg. Bung in the very hot oven for 10 minutes until they are puffed up and golden.

Makes six, a perfect Sunday afternoon quantity for two very greedy people. Oh, sorry, no picture – just the crumbs left.

Not a dish to throw together this one – there are three components, the bechamel, pesto and mushroom mixture – so it probably takes a good two hours from start to finish. (I had to run to the supermarket for pine nuts, so it’s a bit difficult to judge). However, the pesto just requires turning on a food processor, so if a bechamel doesn’t daunt you, then all there is to do is a bit of chopping and sautéeing for the mushrooms. Then comes the fun bit of layering the ingredients in the dish – I always use my oven-proof pyrex dish that I use for trifle too as I love seeing the different layers waiting for the final meld. Then it’s ready for the oven, at which point there’s time to open a self-congratulatory bottle of red wine and put your feet up for half an hour before lunch. There’s nothing worse than eating when not relaxed, and nothing better than the calming knowledge of having a dish cooking to perfection in the oven. Leave the washing up until later, and let the wonderful aromas of pesto and parmesan waft around the house until everyone’s ready to eat.

Technorati Tags: baking, basil, cooking, food, food and drink, home cooking, lasagna, mushroom, nigel slater, pasta, pesto, vegetarian, recipe

As with any dish of this kind, quantities are a bit vague, and really a function of how big your dish is or how big your appetite. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a bit less pesto, or if you end up with extra layers of pasta to fit everything in – cooking time in the oven is really forgiving (anything from 30 to 55 minutes) as long as the individual components are cooked properly to begin with. Just make sure it’s bubbling and brown and it will be great, and of course you could always prepare it in advance and cook it from cold for longer.

For the bechamel:
1 litre whole milk
3 heaped tablespoons flour
45g butter

For the pesto:
60g pine nuts
2 big bunches basil, giving about 4 handfuls of leaves
4 tablespoons grated parmesan
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled

For the sautéed mushrooms:
A thick slice of butter
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
500g mushrooms, sliced
1 handful chopped parsley
10g porcini mushrooms
2 tablespoons grated parmesan

Lasagne sheets, preferably the type that doesn’t need precooking to make your life easier

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Start with the mushrooms. Sauté the onions and garlic in the butter over a medium heat for around 20 minutes until definitely soft and transparent. Meanwhile cover the porcini in around 100ml of boiling water. After the onions have softened, add the mushrooms, porcini with their cooking water, parsley and a couple of tablespoons grated parmesan. Cook with the lid half on, allowing quite a lot of moisture to escape, for around 20 minutes, until the mushrooms are coloured and nice and soft.

During this sauté time, you can make the pesto by putting all the ingredients in a food processor, and processing it until it forms a paste. Don’t worry too much about the consistency (too dry, too wet), as it will blend into the bechamel during cooking.

Prepare the bechamel by melting the butter in a saucepan, and then cooking in the flour as a roux for a few minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in the milk gradually until it has all been incorporated. Return to the heat and cook, stirring fairly assiduously, for 10 to 15 minutes until glossy and thickened.

Now my favourite bit: find an ovenproof dish around 20x25cm. Ladle in a bit of the bechamel to cover the bottom, then put a layer of lasagna sheets. Follow this with half the mushroom mixture (if it is still very liquidy, then lift out just the mushrooms with a slotted spoon). Follow with a quarter of the bechamel. Now a layer of pasta, the rest of the mushrooms, another quarter of the bechamel, and another layer of pasta. Spread the pesto over this final pasta layer, and top with the rest of the bechamel. Give a good grating of parmesan over the top, and bake for around 30-40 minutes until there are browned bits on top.

Quiche lorraine is, predictably, my ultimate favourite. With its combination of the pale wobbly custard spiked saltily with ham and the crisp pastry shell, and served with a sharply dressed salad, it is one of my favourite lunches, as good hot from the oven as it is cold. Of course, there are many different variations on quiche fillings, and I don’t pretend this one is authentic or definitive at all – it’s just the one that I cook at home. Once you’ve worked out the amount of pastry and custard that work for your tin, then it’s easy to adapt the filling to what’s in the fridge.

The amount of pastry given will line two quiches – I give double quantities as I don’t like making “just enough” pastry. It’s not that I might muck up rolling it out (this method seems to produce resilient pastry that rolls out brilliantly in even the hottest of kitchens and the clumsiest of hands – i.e. mine), but that having an extra bit of pastry waiting in the fridge isn’t really a problem. Just seeing the little ball of resting pastry opens up all sorts of possibilities that you might not bother with if you had to make pastry from scratch. I’m a fan of using unsweetened pastry even for puddings, especially ones with very sweet fillings such as treacle tart. (The search for the ultimate treacle tart recipe may be a holy grail type quest, or at least deserving of its own blog – but I will at least make a start soon…)

Technorati Tags: baking, cooking, cooking, eggs, food, food and drink, home cooking, pancetta, quiche, recipe

For the pastry (double quantities) (Nigella Lawson’s method)
:
240g flour, I use 00 flour as she suggests
120g butter
a little iced water with a squeeze of lemon

For the quiche:
4 eggs
150g single cream
150g whole milk
3 tablespoons grated cheese

150g cubed pancetta or bacon
1 white onion, chopped
2 tomatoes

1 fairly deep 20cm fluted pie tin, with removable base

About 90 minutes before you want to eat, start making the pastry. Measure the flour into the bowl of a food processor. Add the fat, cold from the fridge in 1cm dice, and bung the bowl in the freezer for 10 minutes. When it comes out, process until it looks like oatmeal. Start adding the iced water a tablespoon at a time, processing in between, and stop just when the mixture looks like it’s all about to start to stick together, but before it actually does (don’t panic, I invariably add more water than was actually needed, and it turns out fine). Then take out the dough, press together, and divide into two halves. Wrap both in clingfilm and into the fridge to rest for half an hour.

While the pastry is resting, preheat the oven to 170°C. When ready, roll out one of the balls and line the quiche tin. Then put in the fridge to rest again for 20 minutes. Sauté the onion in a little olive oil, adding the pancetta after 5 minutes or so, and cook for a further 5 minutes. Remove from the pan and pat with kitchen towel, just to remove some of the extra fat.

Put the tin on a baking tray, for ease of maneuver, and bake blind for 15 minutes, until the pastry is turning golden. I don’t bother to faff around with baking beans and foil, but just prick the base with a fork, more through tradition than rationale, and keep an eye on it during cooking. If you have lined the tin carefully, making sure that the pastry isn’t stretched across the base, then it shouldn’t rise too much during cooking. If it does start to bulge up, I just reach into the oven and gently push it down again with a tea-toweled hand. This works for me, but I’m sure experienced cooks all have their own routine!

In a measuring jug, mix together the eggs, milk, cream and cheese with a fork. Spoon the pancetta and onion mixture onto the pastry, distributing evenly, and pour over the custard. Return to the oven and cook for 30 minutes until the custard has just set and is just browning a little on top. If you like, you can lay some sliced tomatoes on top about half-way into cooking time, when the custard has firmed up enough to support the weight of the slices.